


Redrawing Borders

by omphale23



Category: The Baker (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He liked the uncertainty of it all, the importance of observation, the dependency and the strange break between motion and existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redrawing Borders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hpstrangelove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hpstrangelove/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Shrinking Maps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/37358) by [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23). 



After Amsterdam, he went through a brief period of reading quantum physics. Just to relax, on long plane trips and while he was staking out locations. He liked the uncertainty of it all, the importance of observation, the dependency and the strange break between motion and existence.

The math of it was impenetrable, so Milo ignored the math. Instead, he cast himself as the scientist, and Bjorn as the cat. Maybe they were both there. Maybe only one of them was. And the only problem with the whole thing—the reason that Milo switched to Zen tapes, in the end—was that to find out for certain, one of them would probably need to be dead.

***

Milo didn't think anything of it at first. If anything, it took him an embarrassingly long time to even notice there was an _it_ to think of.

He'd honestly thought that Bjorn had shown up in Barcelona by coincidence, even when they wound up on the same beach, exchanging cautious glares and eventually—after a lot of negotiation and three false starts—smoothing sun lotion on each other. It wasn't as if Milo could ask what brought him there, because a) it would be rude, given their profession, and b) Bjorn would probably lie anyhow.

So Milo shrugged his shoulders and turned over, sunglasses over his eyes as he watched Bjorn stare out at the water.

***

Zen koans made even less sense than quantum probability. And they put him to sleep, which was welcome but not exactly the point. Anyone who could listen to such things without going mad must already be mad at the start.

***

Johannesburg was more complicated. Milo was about to leave, job done and client happily taking over a diamond mine that had, until very recently, been a private concern, when Bjorn sat next to him in the bar and bought two drinks. Milo nodded, drank one, and missed the next flight out. And the three after that.

The hotel rooms in Johannesburg had gratifyingly thick walls and Bjorn was much, much more interesting when he wasn't talking. Also surprisingly roomy were the back of Milo's rental car, the toilets in the airport departures lounge, and the seats of British Airways First Class.

They'd been politely reprimanded for the last two, but Milo considered it well worth the trouble when Bjorn tried to climb onto his motor bike and hissed out an oath in one of the many languages that Milo didn't speak. It was even worth the ache in his jaw, when Bjorn pulled him in for one last kiss in the parking garage, one more sliding of hands over Milo's shoulders, one more—Milo eventually walked away, but he could feel Bjorn watching him go.

***

Milo listened to all seven _Harry Potter_ novels, and then contemplated the cost of a simple kidnapping. Surely the ending could be rewritten, given the right kind of persuasion.

Fiction, then, was a dead end.

***

Still, it was proximity and luck, as much as anything, when they ran into each other in far flung cities and continents. Milo didn't call it anything, and if he sometimes showed up at Bjorn's hotel room without a phone call, that was almost entirely because he didn't have a phone number to call. If Bjorn found him by the pool and smirked, swam laps knowing that Milo was ignoring him, and then pressed Milo up against the walls of rickety elevators in a dozen countries, it was simply the unlikely coincidences that ruled their lives. Milo didn't question it.

Bjorn didn't say anything either, and they carried on in this way for years, through the end of the decade and well into the new century, from Sydney to Montreal to Paris.

***

Poetry wasn't much better.

***

Paris was particularly memorable; they'd nearly been arrested for indecent exposure—in French—and Bjorn hadn't spoken to Milo for eight months. Milo didn't need him to speak, and so they carried on just fine, trading blowjobs in alleys and fucking in nightclub corners before spinning away, back into assignments and meetings and violent ends. Milo could say _guess what's in my pocket_ in thirteen languages, and Bjorn guessed right every time.

Milo didn't make promises, and Bjorn didn't offer compromises, and later, after it was all over, that was maybe the way it ended, the clue that Milo had overlooked. Then again, maybe it wasn't.

***

The sound of rain and waterfalls was soothing for a few days, but after a while it only made him thirsty. Bird songs made Melville fluttery, the crash of waves reminded Milo of beaches he didn't revisit, and the calling of the whales was perhaps calming for whales, but for humans it was less than effective.

***

They never met in London. They'd pass on the street, meet each other leaving buildings, frequent the same curry shops and bookstores. But Milo hesitated, and by the time he'd decided to say _hello_, Bjorn would be looking carefully away, staring through Milo like a stranger.

It wasn't that Milo necessarily wanted to meet up and split a curry, or to sit at a table in his local and watch a game. It wasn't that he wanted a repeat of Vancouver, when Bjorn had brought leather cuffs and Milo had spent the next week showering with the grinding sting of his wrists a reminder. But the possibility of it was—

tempting. Impossible. Terrible.

***

The self-help manual promised _a happier you in five minutes a day, satisfaction guaranteed_. Milo gave it three solid weeks. And he took up jogging, because the self-help manual also promised that if he would _take a moment to breathe in the world_ he would find inner calm and possibly lose weight.

He caught a cold, running about in the rain and too much spandex. Leo laughed at his headband. He didn't feel rejuvenated, and the trainers gave him blisters.

***

And then there was Amsterdam.

Milo had planned an actual holiday, not a holiday that happened to end in a homicide or a stalking-minor-bureaucrats-through-red-light-districts sort of holiday. A proper one, for which he'd booked a touring package and bought ridiculous shirts and a borrowed a belt with a special pouch attached to hold his itinerary. The sort of holiday that one chose with a partner, a friend, so that there would be someone familiar to laugh at the translation book and eat waffles in the afternoon. Milo had even bought a camera to take some holiday snaps for the album that he wouldn't manage to put together after.

And, at the very last minute, he'd left a brochure in Bjorn's letterbox. No explanation, just the glossy pages and his realization that maybe, perhaps, this thing could be more than a casual global game of chicken. That maybe it had been an _it_ all along, and Milo simply hadn't noticed.

He always did have an unfortunate tendency to misinterpret subtleties.

Bjorn hadn't shown up at the airport. Or at the hotel, or at any of the first five tour stops. Milo had been surprised, at first. And then he'd gone quickly through angry and hurt and confused until he wound up firmly in the category of resigned. Which was where he remained, until on the second-last day of the trip he'd looked up from his paper and spotted Bjorn standing across the street under a lamppost, watching.

Milo ignored him.

Well, no. In truth, Milo watched back, but he refused to admit that he'd been waiting, and so when Bjorn turned away, strolled out of sight, Milo reminded himself _good riddance_ and went back to eating his pastry full of unidentifiable but delicious cream. He left for home a day early, luggage full of tacky souvenirs and hotel shampoo.

On the train home, he tried to remember when he'd decided that killing people was his calling.

It was nearly a year before he needed the same suitcase to pack for Wales. Only then did Milo open the lid and unfold the note in the bottom, a time and an address scrawled over the paper in familiar black marking pen.

***

He finally worked his way around to a dating service, because several magazines advised that a relationship was the key to longevity, job success, and sexual healing—although the latter might have been a dimly remembered Marvin Gaye tune, instead—and Milo's last attempt at a relationship had been an utter failure. Maybe he was in the wrong line of work altogether. Maybe it was time for a bit of a change.


End file.
